Žižek's entire writings
on communism are a strategy to render socialist revolution as the
"impossible to realize" Platonic ideal and to chastise anyone on the
left who believes otherwise. His preachings turn communist theory into
speculative idealism, rather than materialism, in order to make it as
palatable as religion to the ruling classes.

In one of his most recent versions of communism (does Žižek
believe in anything other
than believing in nonbelieving?) in an op-ed (The New York Times,
December 6, 2013) he writes, "If we merely abolish market (inclusive of
market exploitation) without replacing it with a proper form of the
Communist organization of production and exchange, domination returns
with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation." In other words,
unless we build communism before communism, then any revolution
is "doomed" to what he calls "the 'totalitarian' temptation." This
formula of a communism which arrives as a fully formed miraculous
"event"—a post-historical cyber-communism that defies the
historical and moves
by "mutation" against the dialectics of history—is what Paolo Virno
calls the "communism of capital" (A Grammar of the Multitude). The communism of capital is of course the virtual spectre
deployed to ward off the real spectre of communism by marking it under
the familiar trope of "totalitarianism."

Who does Žižek cite to
defend this formula? Ayn Rand. He writes, "It is easy to ridicule Ayn
Rand, but there is a grain of truth in the famous 'hymn to money' from
her novel Atlas Shrugged…the moment of truth in Rand's otherwise
ridiculously-ideological claim: the great lesson of state socialism was
effectively that a direct abolishment of private property and
market-regulated exchange, lacking concrete forms of social regulation
of the process of production, necessarily resuscitates direct relations
of servitude and domination."

In this articulation of
the failure of previous socialist movements as lacking "concrete forms
of social regulation of the process of production," Žižek dematerializes
Marx's argument that communism "is not devoid of premises. It starts out
from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its
premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and fixity, but in
their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under
definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described,
history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the
empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of
imagined subjects, as with the idealists" (The German Ideology). Instead, Žižek's communism is, as Marx writes, "an ideal to which reality [will] have to
adjust itself." Unlike Marx, who demonstrated that "the conditions of
[communism] result from the now existing premises" (The German Ideology) because existence is shaped by human labor and thus
subject to the organization of human labor under particular social
relations, Žižek's capitalist communism takes communism as the reality
of history and demands that
it become a virtual ideal that is virtual precisely because it is never
real. In doing so it makes the market the default option against the
"totalitarian."

Of course real communism
is not an ideal which must remain the "heart of a heartless world"
(Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right), or, in other words, that ideal which we ascribe to but to
which we never ascend, as in the old religious formula.And nor is it the
"totalitarian terror" which puts such fear in the hearts of shame faced
liberals. It is the historical demand for bringing about—in socialist
praxis (a word missing from the vocabulary of all the liberal "left"
communisms today)—what actually exists as a result of human labor: that
is, a society in which the compulsion to sell one's labor power has
become outmoded and the conditions are in place to establish a global
society free of material need. Communism is a necessary/historical
demand because it is historically possible.

Indeed, this is why Žižek is
asked to write in TheNew York Times, The Guardian, The....
He is the writer who warns the left not to go too far while promising
the working classes eternal happiness in the life-to-come. He is the new
pope of the left.